Getting Started with FriendFeed — TDC Preseason (Week 6)

FriendFeed is going to be a crucial element in both Internet marketing and outside the marketing. If you are communicating to a group of people, FriendFeed is going to be a very important tool.

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You really need to learn how to drive FriendFeed, so you should take it slowly but nicely. If you try to consume straight up, it will really get you, in terms of the volume of information it sends out.

In truth, the secret to FriendFeed is not about volume, but your ability to create conversations around bits of content. This is what FriendFeed excels in. People try to do this on Twitter, but it is not an appropriate place for it.

Twitter is never designed for a conversation platform like instant messaging, Skype, blogs or FriendFeed. It is a micro blogging platform.

What FriendFeed does is it takes any piece of content and provides a mechanism to filter and stream. It allows people to vote and comment on it — all in a central place.

FriendFeed takes content from a whole bunch of different places and it provides a feed of everything that you’re doing. If you follow Ed in FriendFeed, you’ll literally see pretty much everything he’s doing. Whether he’s using Flickr, posting videos, stumbling upon web pages, everything.

Some people refer to FriendFeed as life streaming application. At the end of the day, the more you are able to communicate in a non in-your-face way to the market, the more successful you will be. The more contact you have with your market where your market has the ability to contact you back or respond, the more sales and successful you’ll be.

Twitter and FriendFeed are two of the most powerful tools that have been implemented this year in terms of Internet marketing for doing and fulfilling that exact purpose.

Sign up with FriendFeed

Here you have the option to Sign in or Create an account. Choose the latter if you don’t yet have an account.

FriendFeed is designed by people who created Gmail and a lot of Google services, so it shares the same characteristics.

Th whole sign up thing is a 3-step process. You have to enter your email address, name, nickname (to be used as your FriendFeed URL), and password. Click the Create my account button to submit your data.

Once you start using FriendFeed, it is the best application to feed into your news reader on Facebook. You can find Facebook friends or find from your address book.

The FriendFeed’s Facebook application automatically keeps your friends in Facebook and FriendFeed in sync, which is very convenient. It is definitely something you want to look at.

You can actually, if you like, import your address book. If people are on FriendFeed, it will automatically drag them in. At this point in time, you may not want to do that. This is a more advanced thing for later on.

Whichever option you choose, the next screen, which is still on the second step, is the option to add popular FriendFeeders. For now, just skip this step. You don’t want to get overwhelmed by the volume of information / feeds because they can be quite enormous. So, click on the Next: See your FriendFeed! button.

If you happen to sign up to Google Reader, you want to add that particular account.

All you need to do is to find your Google Reader shared item URL. If you don’t know what it is click on the link that says Google Reader shared items page. It will open a new browser tab to your Google Reader.

Your screen may not look the same, especially if you don’t have shared anything yet. Right click on the link shown above and choose Copy link location. Paste the link back to FriendFeed.

If you have a blog, you can add your blog feed in. Click the See all 41 services to see all applications on one screen.

You can pop your YouTube account in. Fefinitely add your Twitter account. You may optionally follow people here instead of their Twitter because it is much easier and also that currently FriendFeed has a huge capacity.

Twitter and FriendFeed are two different things. Ed will explain it in the next video.

If you are familiar with any of these services, you should add them in, because what it does is that it grabs data from all these different services and provides a single feed, which is really cool.

As another example, let’s add YouTube account. You can do so by clicking on the YouTube link.

The only field you need to fill is your YouTube username before hitting the Import YouTube button.

As you see, it is very easy and simple to setup. Once you import your feeds (you can always add more later if you want), click on the friends tab to go to a page showing an aggregation of your friends’ feeds.

Your page may not be very busy right now but that’s expected. You should get yourself familiar with the whole thing first.

Access your particular FriendFeed’s feed from the me tab. The content of this page depends on the services you feed into FriendFeed. From the same page, you will notice if people liked or commented on any of your items.

If you have video content, clicking on the video once will play the video inline in the same page immediately.

From this demonstration, you can see that FriendFeed is an aggregation place where people can come and discuss the elements of content. They don’t have to go everywhere. If you are pulling people everywhere, they will be confused and not be able to do it.

What FriendFeed does is aggregating those people on a central place. That is very important from the marketing standpoint.

If you want to add a comment, click once on the Comment link below any item.

You will be able to add a comment right there in the new field that pops out at the bottom of the entry.

Other things you can do include:

Link to the entry. Get a permalink to this entry.

Reshare the entry. Share the item again on your feed or any of the rooms (more on rooms later).

Moderate comments. As the owner of the feed, you can choose to moderate submitted comments.

Delete this entry. Dismiss the entry from your feed.

FriendFeed’s Room

One thing that is really special especially for Thirty Day Challenge is the rooms functionality.

Start by joining the Thirty Day Challenge room. You can click the Share something button to start sharing something with people in the room.

Notice the green message up there that has a link called FriendFeed Sharing Bookmarklet? You can make your sharing experience easier by using a bookmarklet. Click once on the link.

Drag the Share on FriendFeed button to your Flock toolbar.

Back to the 30DC room. In this particular room, you can find Thirty Day Challengers contributed something that they find interesting.

An important thing is, everything in FriendFeed is… an RSS feed!

You can grab the feed for Thirty Day Challenge room into your Google Reader. Follow along with previous video or summary on using Google Reader if you don’t know how to do that.

In Thirty Day Challenge, you will find out absolute killer way to use FriendFeed for your Internet marketing. Also, every team should create their own room. It is a one stop shop for everyone to keep up with what everybody’s doing. You can also leave comments for each other, track via RSS feed. You can make the room private or public, your choice.

It takes a while to get used to FriendFeed but the effort is really worth it.

What to Do

If you haven’t done it yet, now is the time to get a FriendFeed account and start getting used to it. Subscribe to Ed’s FriendFeed, join Thirty Day Challenge room and most important of all, have fun with it!